i heard a story from a guy the family used to hunt with 20 years or so ago about patton hiding weapons of all sorts in the deserts of california and arizona. has anyone ever heard any of these stories? he said the reason behind him doing this was in case the japanese made it to the us. its been on my mind lately and i live in yuma and know people who have found a sherman tank while testing at ypg. i have personally have found old fighting holes and lots of 30-06 brass deep in the desert where people arent allowed to go while building new test sites. ive always found this subject very interesting. ive talked to old timers who have personally buried harley davidsons at ypg back in the 50's. has anyone ever found or even heard anything on the subject? also i know where some m151's are buried but impossible to get...

Patton did indeed bury a lot of equipment in the desert. It had nothing to do with the Japanese though. Patton had a short amount of time to train his troops before heading out to North Africa. As time got short, when a jeep or truck had problems while deep in the desert, they would just have a tractor dig a hole and push the disabled vehicle in and bury it. A lot of that supposedly happened North of Joshua Tree.

I have found a ton of brass, bullets, and shrapnel, but no vehicles so far.

My dad got into metal detecting in the 70's and early in the 80's I went out to several of the Patton camps with him and we dug up all sorts of stuff - practice land mines and practice hand grenades, numerous medals and dog tags, etc. I dug out a wooden case full of radio parts and another wooden case full of Schlitz beer bottles. We had heard stories about tanks and half tracks that had been dug out of some of the camps and we occaisonally would come across large pits that were big enough to bury a vehicle.This BLM publication has a lot of great info about Patton's Desert Training Center. http://www.amazon.com/Desert-Training-C ... 232&sr=1-3I 've got a copy, but I certainly didn't pay 177.00 for it.

the story i heard is that there were bunkers hidden in the hills full of equipment. now i know that they did bury vehicles all over in the desert like i said a buddy of mine was on a test in ypg when they found one. the only thing that was exposed was the turret. its on display at ypg now. now only if they would let me use their gpr to find some stuff...

I realize this is a little off topic, but I read a book a number of years ago called "Silent Siege" which told stories of Japanese attacks which took place with minimal success on mainland North America. One of the very interesting stories relates how they used the jet stream to send "balloon bombs" across to the United States in the hopes that they would drop at unsuspecting locations causing widespread panic amongst the populace.

If I recall, there are stories about folks finding some of these bombs still lying "dormant" and in some cases still lethal in remote areas of the country. Just another thing to keep an eye out for on your desert explorations